Run by the British Centre for Literary Translation in partnership with Writers’ Centre Norwich, the International Literary Translation and Creative Writing Summer School brings together translators from different countries for a one-week intensive programme of literary translation and creative writing practice in Norwich. 

WCN Programme Assistant Tina García reflects on this year’s summer school,, as it celebrated its 15th edition in the Julian Study Centre at UEA and at WCN’s new home in Dragon Hall.

I have always felt grateful to literary translators: without their work I wouldn’t have been able to discover many great authors and read some of my favourite books, masterpieces which have somehow changed my way of looking at the world or texts which have just (just!?) made me smile during the reading – and sometimes, quite a long time after it. Now that I am a foreigner in the UK, using a non-native language on a daily basis, I am even more aware of the importance of their work, not only in a literary context, also in a cultural one: translated literature is a way of discovering new cultures, new ideas, different ways of seeing, thinking, living.

For that reason, I felt really lucky when I had the opportunity of collaborating in the organisation of the International Literary Translation and Creative Writing Summer School together with our colleagues from the British Centre for Literary Translation . From the 26th July to 1st August 2015 at the UEA and at the new home of the Writers’ Centre Norwich – the beautiful Dragon Hall-almost 50 participants from many different countries took part in a series of creative writing and translation workshops.

All of them translated into English, but from different languages depending on the workshop: from Dutch (led by David Colmer and Jeroen Thijssen), German (with Katy Derbyshire and Kristof Magnusson), Italian (Howard Curtis and Andrea Tarabbia), Korean (Deborah Smith and Han Kang) and Norwegian (Kari Dickson and Brit Bildøen), but also two multilingual, one for prose led by Sarah Bower and Daniel Hahn; the other one for poetry with George Szirtes. In every single workshop participants and tutors organised their work in a different way, but sharing the same goal: not to translate in just a literal way, word by word, but to go beyond that and translate the cultural context, the feeling, the sensibility of the writer. A very enriching point in this summer school was the fact that in most of the workshops the authors of the texts being translated were involved in the working process and answering the queries that the translators had.

This year for the first time the summer school also included creative writing workshops with Sarah Bower, Sharlene Teo, Cecilia Rossi, Henrietta Rose-Innes and Eliza Robertson. Sessions where the translators were invited to develop their own writing, adapting texts to different voices and contexts, reinterpreting them and also, being aware of the constraints that a translator can face when working.

Whilst the 2015 summer school has finished, the translations and texts created by the participants – and successfully presented during the last afternoon at Dragon Hall – will remain, and are a good souvenir of a very intensive and fulfilling week.

See you next year!

The British Centre for Literary Translation  is Britain’s leading centre for the development, promotion and support of literary translation.